Bing at a glance

So some of you may have heard that Microsoft is/has launched a new search engine, they claim it’s in order to catch Yahoo, the second most popular search engine online, but we all know Microsoft have always had Google in their targets but I think they are telling the truth and this is maybe a two tiered attack.

I've inserted an image for a quick look at bing or head over to www.bing.com

Now firstly where did they come up with the name Bing? Google is so well known that ‘to google’ has been included in dictionaries since 2006, so will we all be binging it in2019? I like to think that this search engine was dreamt up in a suburb in New York full of Italian-Americans and they said, “basically Big BG (Bill Gates) you hit search then bada-boom bada-BING – the results are shown” and this is how Bing was born, but really the name doesn’t matter, its what’s in the box that counts.

So first impressions: Appearance, when you open up bing.com your greeted with a beautiful picture of mountains and a lake, a tranquil image, it’s more interesting than the plain Google page we’re normally greeted with, and a lot less cluttered than the Yahoo home page with all its news. Now I’m not a Yahoo user, but I’m guessing that part of the reason users use Yahoo is for access to the news and for access to their e-mail etc, so has MS missed a trick here? I’m not sure that they will win Yahoo users over on appearance alone, though it is nicer than the standard Google page – but then I imagine most people now user iGoogle which is full of fun and if your a web developer like me then your iGoogle is very important! So the Bing appearance, I’m going to say it’s pretty and impressive on first impressions, but ummm why. But lets not get caught up on appearance there are more important things to consider like how it works!

Next up: How it work. Now I’ve read a couple of things on Bing, online and in the Times and the one major difference compared to all the other search engines is that the results are presented in three columns, the right is reserved for sponsored links (i.e. where the search engines make all their money) the centre column is reserved for the results, but in the left hand column there is something new, related searches, in an article I read it claimed that when someone searches, the search engine bing recognises what is being searched for an suggests related searches in the left hand column, the example was if someone searches for a Nikon camera, bing recognises that it is a camera and will also return search results in the left column for shops where you can buy the camera, user manuals, reviews and lots of other related results – however when I tried it and I searched for my camera which I bought some four months ago (Sony T77) my ‘related searches’ results returned umm nothing, so excellent concept, but does it really work? I’m not going to attack bing here, as in the UK we’re still playing with the beta version right now, as it is soon to be or has just been launched in the States with a $100 million advertising campaign. But since IE8 introduced the chrome favourite website thumbnail concepts I have been using bing quite a lot and have noticed that quite often when I search the left hand column is blank, but like I said, lets give them time and a chance. A very nice feature they seem to have introduced is a pop up box, when you hover just right of the results a preview box with the first couple of paragraphs of text appears to help you decide if the website is the right result without visiting it. I also understand that this feature will stream videos without you having to click on the video – a excellent concept, but will it actually work?

The most important part of a search engine: Results. This has been quite hard to assess really, how can I decide if the results returned by bing are better than Yahoo or Google? If I search for an obvious term, one such as the football team I support then I would expect the Clubs website to be the top result and it was, but it was interesting how they all presented the information. Google as we would expect delivered the ’site links’ – these are sublinks which enable the user to quickly reach a specific part of the website without going through the home page, they usually logically reflect the site navigation and thus the main sections of the website, Google also returned a search box which allowed me to search the club website using Google. Yahoo impressed me with its results (as I mentioned I’m not a Yahoo user) at the very top of the results was a box full of stats as well as a link to the website, these stats showed the league position, last match result top scorer and more. Just below this info box was the first real result which again was the club website and Yahoos take on ’site links’ but these were not as logical as Googles. Finally we reach the new Search Engine, Bing, and sadly it seemed to me that the concept was good but the delivery poor, Bing also presents us with site links but this time they were news story links a great concept, but sadly nearly all the news stories were old news, and I mean 7 months old, which in the world of sport is very old, so for me Bing comes out last in this test. To further supplement this test I wanted to search for something obscure but I couldn’t think of anything so decided to search for my own company to see how we perform, I’m pleased to say that on Google and Yahoo we were Number 1 as I’d expect, but on Bing we didn’t even make the top 100 which worries me for more than one reason. Just to be safe I then searched on Bing for my company using “” and we were 5th, though on this occasion I’m going to let Bing off as the other websites above us were all related to us, but this still worries me a little. Are these search results a simple teething problem? and lets not forget it has only just been launched here in the UK, but still it seems to come third out of three for me.

I guess the obvious questions are, is it better than Yahoo or Google? Will it return better results? and most importantly will it topple either of them? Following my personal test and in my opinion, the answer is NO, though the concept of Bing is great and there seems to be some fantastic ideas, unless they work then there is no point to them and it only frustrates me as a user. I must say though I am disappointed with Bing my first impressions of Bing were impressive, and I must admit, I am a Microsoft fan (well I’m not anti Microsoft) but I don’t see this really toppling Google, and I’m not even sure Yahoo will be concerned but if Bing can take second place in the Search Engine popularity stakes, then we will be paying much closer attention to it than we already are.